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September 2006
 World Community Grid – an IBM funded project that brings together the collective power of millions of idle computers around the world - is contributing to the fight to cure cancer.
Grid technology provides processing power for researchers that is much greater than the world’s largest supercomputers.
The "Help Defeat Cancer" project will use the computational power of IBM's World Community Grid to provide the power to analyze a large number of cancer tissue microarrays (TMA) that will help doctors improve treatment and therapy planning for cancer patients.
Researchers from The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Rutgers University and the University of Pennsylvania have created a web-based, robotic prototype that automatically analyzes, archives, shares, and creates images of digitized tissue microarrays. These microarrays allow scientists to better study cancer and its effects. World Community Grid will supply substantial supercomputer power to enable more complex comparisons to run much more efficiently.
“What this means is that the power of grid technology enables us to analyze hundreds of arrays simultaneously, allowing multiple experiments to be conducted within a shorter period of time,” said Dr. David J. Foran, professor and lead researcher at The Cancer Institute of New Jersey, UMDNJ-Robert Wood Johnson Medical School. "World Community Grid makes it possible to analyze in one day the number of specimens that would take approximately 130 years to complete using a traditional computer."
The researchers have received funding from the National Institutes of Health and The Cancer Institute of New Jersey. They will start by analyzing breast cancer, with head and neck cancers just around the corner.
The results will also give researchers better insight into which patient groups will most likely respond to certain treatments, as well as providing information for drug design in the future.
Companies and individuals can assist the “Help Defeat Cancer” initiative by downloading World Community Grid’s free software onto their computers and registering at its website: www.worldcommunitygrid.org.
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